


Quicksilver

by ElDiablito_SF



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Light BDSM, M/M, Painplay, Post-Canon, Spanking, The Fanfiction Gap, Treasure Island Can Suck It, season 3 and beyond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2016-08-20
Packaged: 2018-08-09 22:02:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7818910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/pseuds/ElDiablito_SF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Silver has his own ways of coming to terms with his pain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quicksilver

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dee218](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dee218/gifts).



> First of all, Fandom, I love you a lot. Second, #TreasureIslandCanSuckIt (I was inspired by Sus' battlecry). This combines my own take on all that with the fanfiction gap between 2x10 and 3x01 and also after The Conjugal SceneTM in 3x01 . These two assholes do the best they can, okay, don't judge me, I am but their gross vessel.

***

“You were so young then, so… mercurial.” The room had been dark, the only light coming from the soft burn of the pipe smoked by the man at the window on a moonless night. He took another puff, smoke hanging about his lips like clouds, mist that wouldn’t dissipate. The smell of tobacco mingled with the smell of mildew that pervaded almost everything on the island. “I wanted so much to keep you,” the smoker continued, his back still turned towards his companion, a man with a wooden leg. “To keep you with me always. But you were like quicksilver: ever changing, impossible to hold.”

“And yet,” John Silver shifted, placing his weight over his crutch so he could move his false leg. “Here I still am.”

The man at the window turned and took another long drag at the pipe, the soft light illuminating his hair, more gray now than it had ever been red.

“Here you are,” Captain Flint nodded in agreement.

***

“I understand this is all incredibly personal to you after the loss of Mrs. Barlow…”

“...Now wait a minute…”

“And I understand the burden of playing the role you currently play must be taking a toll that even you cannot comprehend…”

“Stop!” Flint stood so close that Silver felt the heat emanating off his body. He shut his mouth, and his eyes, quite unbidden, dropped to the captain’s collarbones, before lifting back up to meet his gaze. His gaze that appeared on the verge of devouring him. “Now you have wormed your way into the heads of the men out there and they’ve granted you authority over them because of that, but in my head, you’re not welcome.”

If Flint had punched him at that moment, it probably would have hurt less. This, right here, is what you get for allowing yourself to give a fuck, Silver reminded himself. His eyes fell upon Flint’s lips. He had known them to be much more generous than at that moment. Surely, no one would ever dare to accuse Captain Flint of being a man incapable of cruelty, but at that instant, the desire to hurt was all too plainly written in Flint’s features for Silver not to heed it. He averted his eyes and hung his head.

***

It had been a game he played with himself, a game that involved pretending that what he had told Flint was true: the men sent to watch over the _Urca_ gold had lied. He had learned of their treachery by accident. He had been ignorant of their conspiring with Rackham. He was an innocent.

The cross on his chest burned the first few days after he had woken up, legless and vulnerable, and entirely too much at Flint’s mercy, yet ever in his presence. He wanted to tell Flint the truth. He also wanted to live.

It hurt to live.

It was as if all the nerves of his body had somehow converged into a singular, spectacular, searing pain. Sure, there was the laudanum, freely and generously administered by Doc Howell, but Silver needed to stay clearheaded to think. There was no telling what nonsense he might let slip. Such as confessing the reason for his pathetic Hail Mary that he had thrown up to save the crew from Vane. To save Flint from Vane.

And _now_ \- God help them all - Flint and Vane were _friends_. Or at least not actively trying to kill each other. He missed so much just by being unconscious.

“You’re alive,” Silver remembered saying through the constant fog that clouded his mind.

“It would appear so,” Flint’s reply came from somewhere overhead, flowing down upon Silver in a cloud of gold.

“You look like you’ve lost a limb,” Silver said with a chuckle. And then, a laughter trapped somewhere in his lower abdomen, right around the part where the inflamed nerves of his leg met the inflamed nerves of his groin, bubbled up and out of him, unbidden, uncontrolled, like some susurrating brook running headlong towards the delta.

He wasn’t sure when the laughing had turned into sobbing. He was only sure that suddenly there was warm flesh behind him, all around him, arms like the roots of a tree, holding him steady, anchoring him to the earth.

The cross burned into his flesh and he tore it off from around his neck, clutching it in his hand until it threatened to cut into the very tendons of his palm. Until Flint pried it out of his convulsed fingers.

“It’s alright,” Flint’s voice murmured softly in his ear. “You can let go now.”

Rough, callused fingers tracing along the red lines imprinted in the palms of his hand, rending asunder his lifeline, his heart line, all the lines already carved into it by fate. The cross fell to the floor with a loud clang but Silver still felt the burn of it over his heart.

“You weren’t there,” Silver spoke, to God or to Flint.

“I’m here now,” came the response against his earlobe. And then Flint picked up his hand and pressed his mouth into the soft flesh of Silver’s Venus mount. “Hush now. I’m here.”

***

“In my head, you’re not welcome.”

Silver was about to take a step out of the range of Flint’s all-consuming body heat. It would have been a lot easier to feel indignant anger had he not been simultaneously nursing the gall stone of his own guilt.

“Wait.” Flint’s voice, suddenly too close again. His body hovering next to Silver’s, pressing down against him with a weight that was somehow literal and metaphorical at the same time. As if Flint was a planet, and Silver his moon, and fighting the gravity that kept them in each other’s orbit was a fruitless endeavor. “You are not welcome in my head,” he repeated, apparently not quite finished slipping the blade of his tongue into the belly of Silver’s soul.

“I meant no disrespect…” Silver attempted to placate the dragon before he spread his wings and exhaled enough fire to incinerate the entire crew.

“John…”

“I only say these things to you because I have made the fatal mistake of giving a fuck!”

“ _John_.”

“ _What?_ ” Silver lifted his eyes again in a blaze of defiance, daring Flint to strike him. Hoping he would.

“You are still welcome in my bed.”

“What?”

Silver looked down his body, where it had come flush against Flint’s, thighs touching, Flint’s thumb rubbing circles around the pulsepoint of Silver’s wrist.

“Don’t go, John.”

“God, you’re an exquisite asshole,” Silver exhaled, and allowed Flint’s body to buttress his own as he shifted his weight forward. One of Flint’s hands cradled his face, caressing the outline of his cheekbone with the roughened pad of his thumb.

“You are welcome to any other part of my body,” Flint whispered and claimed Silver’s lips with his own and Silver surrendered for the time being. This particular battle was one he was more than happy to lose, despite recognizing it for the distraction ploy that it was. Flint was nothing if not a military genius.

***

“How do you do it?”

“What?” Flint had looked up from his charts. His eyes seemed even more green than Silver ever remembered them to be and for a moment he wondered whether losing a limb hadn’t amplified all his other sensory functions. It certainly did a number on his skin: vacillating as he did between feeling too much of everything to feeling nothing at all. Perhaps that had been the fault of the laudanum.

“How do you live with the pain?” Silver asked. “I’ve seen you persevere in extraordinary circumstances. You’ve been beaten, slashed at, shot… You didn’t give a shit. Just kept going.”

“Sometimes,” Flint sighed, setting his papers aside, “the physical pain is merely a reminder that your body is still trying to live.”

“Trying to?”

“I would welcome the physical pain over any other kind.”

“I cannot seem to separate the two,” Silver admitted, staring at the ceiling which was simultaneously too close and too far away.

“You have never lost someone,” Flint said.

“That’s not true,” Silver retorted calmly. “I have lost everyone. Perhaps, once you lose everyone, losing someone in particular begins to lose its meaning. I have no one in the world but myself. And now I have also begun to lose parts of him as well. Until one day there will be nothing left but an echo of who I used to be. John Silver: a cipher.”

“That’s the laudanum talking.”

“You said it yourself. There is nowhere else in the world that I matter.”

“It isn’t like you to wallow in self-pity.”

“Isn’t it? Do you even know what that means - to be ‘like me’ - who I am?”

“A man who talks too much, even when he’s in abject agony,” Flint mused and Silver couldn’t suppress a small laugh. “You feel… like you’re drifting without a compass. You’re letting the pain control you, instead of controlling the pain.”

“Ah, how very sage of you, captain. And I suppose you’re going to show me how I can become the captain and quartermaster of my own body then?”

Flint rose and stood over Silver where he lay upon the windowsill.

“I’m happy to captain your body for you, until you get your sea legs back.”

“A cruel joke, Captain Flint.”

“Then why are you smiling, Mr. Quartermaster?”

***

“I want you to hit me,” Silver said, digging his nails into the grooves between Flint’s ribs.

“Then I suggest you make me a lot more angry.”

“No,” Silver shook his head. “I don’t want you to hit me in anger. I want you to hit me because I _want_ you to hit me.” His lips, tired of having to explain himself, pressed back against Flint’s mouth, that full lower lip, begging to be bitten and then kissed better. Flint growled into his kiss, hands suddenly everywhere, and Silver found himself spinning like a wayward top until he was slamming his palms onto the surface of Flint’s desk. “Don’t hold back, I can take it.”

“John, for fuck’s sakes…” Flint’s teeth pressed into his top vertebra, followed by Flint’s lips mouthing over the back of his neck, making his hair rise there as goosebumps broke out over his flesh. Flint’s foot kicked in between Silver’s legs to spread them further as pain radiated up from where his stump was still being suffocated by the unwieldy boot. “We don’t have to do this.”

“You kill your pain however you choose, and I have very little say in it, it would appear. Now _hurt_ me!”

The sting of Flint’s hand against his bare ass made Silver’s skin sing and he had to stifle his moan with his own forearm.

“Again,” Silver panted, arching his back, anticipating the next blow with his entire body. The blow came, landing exactly over the same spot, where Silver imagined a red handprint had begun to blossom like a hibiscus flower. “Ah!” Silver exhaled, flooded with joy and relief. Flint’s fingers curled and clenched over the bone of his left hip. “Again.”

Flint’s other hand loosely tangled in his curls, skated over the nape of his neck and pressed him down over the desk. Behind him, the captain was hard as a rock, his cock pressing the leather of his breeches against Silver’s spread thighs. His hand, as if on some absentminded journey, caressed Silver’s flank.

“Again!”

“This won’t be enough for you soon,” Flint’s words tickled the back of Silver’s neck. “I’ll have to use my riding crop on you.”

“God, _yes_!”

Flint’s hand landed on Silver again, and again, in slaps of quick succession, without letting him catch his breath.

“You look so good like this,” Flint breathed over his ear. “Open and raw and quivering.”

“Fuck me, James.”

“And begging, hmmm… So good for me when you beg for my cock.” Another slap landed on Silver’s inner thigh with such force that he felt it vibrate his flesh all the way to his balls. And then the same hand smoothed over the heated, throbbing flesh, fingers pressing into the coiled muscle there until Silver was ready to cry out from too much pleasure. “Tell me what you want, John.”

“Want you..,” Silver panted into the wood of the desk, “Inside me… please.”

Flint’s hands felt so hot pressed into his lower back, thumbs pressing into the two dimples over his sacrum, as if Silver’s body was made for this, to be held down that way, to be pulled up that way.

“John...” His name was a sigh and a benediction whispered into his ear, like molten lava burning away his last shred of any self control, until Silver whimpered and whined his need and desperation, and Flint’s thumbs trailed along his cleft to spread him apart so Flint could spit and rub that nature’s slick into his hungry and pulsating orifice.

 _This_ was the exquisite kind of pain. This was the pain that Silver could choose, that he could make and unmake at will, the pain that was much more pleasure than agony. All this and so much more in between the palms of Flint’s hands, an entire world at the tip of Flint’s cock as it split him open. He could stay there, like that, impaled forever, pressed between the hard planes of Flint’s desk and Flint’s body, until all other pain stopped, until his world exploded, and for a few moments he knew nothing but blissful emptiness and the weightlessness of a feather blown upon the wind.

***

“I’ll lean more on the ropes,” Silver had said but Howell wasn’t fooled by platitudes. He shouldn’t have let Flint fuck him like that, not with the boot still on. Silver winced again and Howell treated him to another look of disapproval. Perhaps the ropes were a good idea to bring up to Flint, next time, and not so much for leaning.

“If the decay progresses, I'll have to remove more of your leg.”

“I thank you for your tender concern.”

“Surely, you don’t need to be upright for whatever it is you let him do to you!” Howell uttered in a fit of exasperation, avoiding Silver’s eyes by fixing his own on the deformed stump.

“ _Let_ him do to me? Oh doctor,” Silver laughed. “I assure you, there is nothing that he does to me that I have to allow. He has no more power over me than I over him.” Howell didn’t seem particularly impressed by this declaration that Silver had imbued with all of his remaining bravado. “I’m good,” he added for emphasis. “We’re good.”

After Howell left, Silver slowly placed himself down upon his own cot, shutting his eyes and letting his hand trail down over his hips. He let his thumb circle over the jut of his own hip bone and then pressed down, against the bruises he knew would still be there over the next few days, bruises in the shape of Flint’s fingers, and he smiled.

***

“I see you’ve picked up a new habit,” John Silver said, taking the pipe from the hands of the man who had once been his captain, and drawing it to his own lips.

There was an oil lamp burning now in the corner of the small room, casting shadows upon the walls with the licks of its flame like some demented puppet master.

“I have given up rum,” came the slow reply.

Silver leaned back in his chair, his whole leg lightly curled over the wooden peg that served him for the second limb.

“You are aware, quicksilver is known to be fatal if ingested,” Silver drew out in the same melodious tones and cadences that had always held all his listeners in such thrall.

“Is that so?” A wry smirk traversed the other man’s face. “I suppose that must have been what happened to poor Captain Flint.”

“Haven’t you heard? Captain Flint drank himself to death in Savannah.”

“Savannah? I shudder to think. All those swamps.”

“I thought the swamps would lend some much needed mystique to the grim tale,” Silver shrugged, passing the pipe back and watching with interest as the other man placed it between his own lips. “I didn’t come here to argue, James.”

“Why _did_ you come here, John?”

“I didn’t save you and have you spirited away from Nassau so that I could never lay eyes on you again.”

Flint, or rather - the shade of Flint, smiled and leaned forward into the light. Between the wrinkles framing his eyelids, his eyes still sparkled green like the Caribbean in low tide.

“I’m an old man now, John. What could you possibly want to lay eyes on these days?”

John Silver reached out again, this time taking Flint’s hand into his own and drawing his thumb along the deeply cut lifeline that traversed his old captain’s palm.

“And yet, you’re still the same. Constantly, eternally infuriating.”

“A pain in your ass?”

A bright smile illuminated Silver’s features. “You could say that.”

The night air was filled with the singing of cicadas and a heavy humidity. The two men looked up at each other across the table, their eyes met, and neither one drew his hand away.


End file.
